"After the Trump administration rushed through the Willow project in its waning days, a federal judge temporarily halted development pending additional review. Environmentalists want Biden to kill Willow once and for all."
"The Biden administration is facing a major test for its climate agenda in the Alaskan Arctic, where an oil company is proposing a 30-year development that would pump more than half-a-billion barrels of petroleum from a fragile and rapidly-warming ecosystem.
Climate advocates say the Willow project, planned by ConocoPhillips, is incompatible with President Joe Biden’s goal of setting the nation on a path to net-zero emissions by 2050, and are calling on him to reject the proposal.
While Willow was approved in the final months of the Trump administration and was initially defended by the current administration, a federal judge in Alaska vacated the project’s approvals in August, sending it back to the approving agencies for review.
“We’ve been clear from the beginning that it’s an unacceptable project,” said Jeremy Lieb, a senior associate attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law firm that represented advocates in one of two lawsuits that led to the August ruling."
Nicholas Kusnetz reports for Inside Climate News January 23, 2022.
